Each Dotdigital account is automatically given a generic from address to use, which looks something like company.name@r1.dotdigital-email.com. However, using this unbranded from address isn't recommended. Sending from a branded custom from address helps to build trust and maintain positive brand image.

To create a CFA, you can:

The primary reason the industry standard is to use a separate subdomain is reputation risk.

Regardless of how much care and attention you put into making your marketing emails relevant to your lists, there are likely to be some subscribers that decide they no longer want to receive them. Some will unsubscribe, but many users will just continue to not engage with emails and some may even mark your email as spam/junk.

Sending to unengaged contacts or having recipients mark your messages as spam, along with other factors, damage your sending reputation, which may lead to emails landing in the spam folder or even blocklistings with mailbox providers themselves or widely-used blocklists like Spamhaus.

In the rare circumstance that someone does get blocked, our Deliverability team can work with the sender to identify the cause and help request de-listing once a solution has been implemented.

In order to avoid your normal business email going to spam or becoming blocked, regarded best practice is to send from separate subdomain for your marketing email and your regular/transactional email. Major mailbox providers such as Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo prefer marketing emails to be sent from a subdomain in order to help them to identify your mail streams.

We do, from time to time, make changes to our infrastructure, which means that the sending domain/subdomain DNS records need to be changed.

As such, we require access to the records for all the domains we're sending on behalf of. This is easier when the domains are not also accessed by other agencies when used for normal business email or for websites.

For sending domains that are delegated to Dotdigital, we make all necessary DNS changes on your behalf so there’s no action you need to take.

For customers managing their own DNS, we provide you with 14 days notice of any planned changes so you have time to make the necessary changes and avoid interruption to your email sends.

As well as a risk to the reputation of your normal business email, there can also be delays to the speed at which it's delivered if it gets queued with bulk email being sent from the same domain.

We recommend either generating a subdomain, for example, email.yourcompanyname.com, or, failing that, purchasing a CFA from us, such as updates@email-yourcompanyname.com. This protects your company’s normal day-to-day emails from any problems that could be associated with your email marketing.

Creating a branded domain also allows us to include custom tracking links within your emails, plus, set up all the configuration and authentication required for deliverability, so you don't need to involve your IT department in the set up.

Even with an excellent reputation, doing so has a negative impact on deliverability. When you change your ESP, you change the underlying infrastructure, so it’s entirely new for the mailbox providers.

Also, when you delegate the domain to us, your previous ESP won’t work anymore, because essential settings such as email authentication are now pointing to Dotdigital. This means a hard stop when migrating; there is no possibility to use both systems alongside each other.

You should be aware that this can also affect links, including unsubscribe links, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to honor unsubscribes from emails sent from your previous platform.